Embracing chaos in the physics lab

I run week-long AP physics summer institutes, which are essentially classes on how to teach AP Physics 1.  In terms of expectations and attitudes, these institutes turn into a microcosm of my full-year classes for high school students.

My students - and the APSI participants - have been conditioned to believe that the spectrum of good and evil is contiguous with the spectrum of lawful to chaotic.  Problem is, learning is not linear; learning does not obey neat rules.  Many of my best students would not be labeled “lawful” in a role-playing game - they’d be neutral, or very often chaotic.

I totally understand that, in an elementary classroom, chaos simply must be tamed into order so as to avoid the Hobbesian State of Nature that would otherwise be, well, natural.  If it's done right, elementary education should be far more about establishing how to relate to one another in civil society as about serious academic content.  Just as with the rules of writing or musical composition, rules of school must be learned and internalized before they can be professionally broken.

But physics students are emphatically not in elementary school any more.  They know well the rules of appropriate class behaviour and relationships.  While it is certainly important for teachers to intentionally build a positive class culture, we absolutely do not need to use elementary school style rules.  

Nor do we need any "rules" at all.  

When an authority figure dictates to a teenager an externally-imposed rule, the teenager rebels.  Sometimes that rebellion is external, with derisive body language, passive-aggressive or even actually-aggressive speaking out.  Probably more often the rebellion is internal.  A teenager may have learned to present submissive body language and to control their tongue.  Yet, teenagers sneer in their heads, they make plans to break or test each rule, they convince themselves the rule doesn't apply to them, they know from experience that they won't actually be held accountable to the rule.*

*Just as often the teenagers simply didn't register the rule at all because they were thinking about sex when the rule was presented.

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At my summer institutes, I begin by talking to the group from the front of the room using powerpoint slides.  Why?  Because that's what participants expect.  They'd be confused, uncertain, and in most cases angry if I began the week by saying "pick your favorite AP problem and set it up experimentally right here with no guidance or instruction from me, the guy you're paying to give guidance and instruction."

By the middle of the first day of an institute, I've moved on to quantitative demonstrations - still me talking from the front of the room, but using physical equipment to verify the predictions I make on the white board.

Then by day's end, I've stopped talking at the board altogether.  Everyone does a motion graph activity, in which they individually communicate their predictions about the motion represented by a graph.  They bring their predictions and justifications to the front of the room, where I either help them communicate their prediction better... or I check off their prediction, at which point they go to the back of the room to use a motion detector and cart to reproduce their assigned graph.

During this last activity, I don't move - I sit at a desk, talking to each participant in turn as they come to me in a line.  In front of me unfurls a scene that would make my second-grade teacher's head explode.  Participants talk to each other, they physically walk from one classmate to the next seeking suggestions, they drop equipment, they set up equipment in both right and wrong ways... and all the time, I sit there, making not even an attempt to control the chaos.

It's not about control.  It's about lawful chaos.

See, I don't believe in Hobbes*.  Left to their natural state, students certainly are chaotic, but they are not usually selfish.

* Using synecdoche here about Leviathan - not referencing Hobbes the Comic Tiger, whose existence and philosophy I wholeheartedly support.

I don't give the institute participants - nor my students - a list of rules, guidelines, or instructions for this activity*.  Nevertheless, goodness rules.  People help each other, both with the predictions and the experiments.  They discover naturally who has the same graphs to work on, and so "lab groups" form organically.

* The one "rule" that applies here and throughout everything my classes do is the "Five Foot Rule" - students may collaborate freely, but they must separate themselves by five feet before writing anything to be turned in.

In my classes that run in this manner, it's quite rare that I have to call out a student for being "off task."  My tolerance for chaos must be high, of course - I can't be a control freak.  Yes, it often happens that I hear students talking about the upcoming football game; yes, I can occasionally see a student check a text message.  I've got to hold my tongue.  I only say something when the conversation becomes more than a short break - and then I am extraordinarily careful to be polite and respectful.  "Hey, Mr. Jones, I'm coming to your game today, let's talk about it there, okay?"  I don't take a phone away unless students truly can't control themselves - and then I'm still as respectful as I can be.  (The one time years back when I got outwardly frustrated with a student on a cell phone, I severely damaged the relationship with him and at least one of his friends.  My frustration was justified - yet my reaction hurt the situation, it didn't help.)

How do students know what is appropriate or inappropriate if I don't go over rules and guidelines?  They know because they are human beings with 14-19 years of experience interacting with other human beings.

Look, I recognize that's a flippant answer.  If you're asking this question - which I know many readers are - it's not because you're incompetent or stupid.  It's because you're legitimately worried.  Probably you're worried in particular about that one student who thrives on negative attention from their peers and teachers.  What if they don't even pretend to do physics, but instead go from classmate to classmate causing distractions, deliberately sowing the seeds of churlish negativity?  And then, how do you defend yourself to an administrator when you ask the student to leave, but (s)he says with false sincerity, "I didn't know what to do! I didn't know it wasn't okay to talk about non-physics things, and teacher didn't give us any rules or guidelines!"?

That's a battle that many of us, unfortunately, will have to fight.  But rules won't help.

If your administrator is giving any credence whatsoever to such a disingenuous complaint, then this administrator isn't going to suddenly come down on your side if you can show them how the student violated subsection (b) of class rule 3.2i.

Find a way to deal with the one underminer.  Don't seek justice, seek peace - that is, you don't need disciplinary consequences for a pain-in-the-butt student, you just need to be able to separate them from the class when they're not engaging.

This way, the rest of the class won't be afraid to relax and have fun.  Fun is chaotic... and that's okay.